The Rabbit That Spoke: Rafi Haladjian and the Birth of Nabaztag
Paris, 2005. In a small, sunlit apartment near the Canal Saint-Martin, a white plastic rabbit sat motionless on a desk. Two long ears, perfectly pointed. A curious nose. Empty eyes.
Rafi Haladjian stood before it, coffee in hand, eyes gleaming.
“This rabbit,” he whispered to no one in particular, “is going to talk to the world.”
Rafi was no ordinary inventor. An Armenian-born French entrepreneur, he’d always lived slightly ahead of his time—years earlier, he’d tried to launch one of the first internet providers in France, back when the word “modem” was met with blank stares.
Now, he was chasing a different idea: what if the internet wasn’t just on screens? What if it had a voice—a presence—in your home?
He imagined a device that would greet you in the morning, read the weather, alert you to emails, even wiggle its ears when a friend posted on your blog. But not a dull black box. Something with *character*. Something that would make you *feel*.
He turned to the most unlikely animal: a rabbit.
Why a rabbit? “Because,” Rafi would later say with a smile, “nobody is afraid of a rabbit.”
With a team of engineers and designers, Rafi set to work. The prototype was clunky. The Wi-Fi chip misbehaved. The voice was robotic. One early version fell off a shelf when it tried to “hop.”
But day by day, code by code, the rabbit came alive.
They named it Nabaztag, from the Armenian word for “rabbit.” And when the first fully functioning unit blinked its lights, perked up its ears, and said “Hello, Rafi”—he knew they had done it.
At launch, people didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a toy? A pet? A piece of art?
Yes. And no. Nabaztag was something *new*—a connected creature, before smart speakers and AI assistants became common. It could read RSS feeds. Tell the time. Announce traffic. Play music. Even breathe, softly, with a pulsing light.
Children loved it. Artists hacked it. Programmers gave it new tricks.
Nabaztag became a symbol of the early Internet of Things—playful, strange, full of possibility.
It never became a household name like Alexa or Siri. But it didn’t need to. It had already spoken to the future.
And for Rafi Haladjian, that was the point all along: to bring a little magic into the machines we live with—and to remind us that technology, too, can have ears, a heart, and a soul.
